All of that will sound familiar if you lived in the United States in the months after George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. The idea that the United States needed a fundamental rethinking of policing became mainstream. Then-candidate Joe Biden suggested that federal funding to police departments should be tied to them maintaining some “standards of decency and honorableness.” Then-candidate Kamala D. Harris questioned additional spending on policing. Former president Barack Obama called for the country to “reimagine” policing.I think Perry leaves out "cable news Democrats" and associated influential pundits, the ones who regularly project their bigotries and malevolence on the population at large. The only people consistently repeating "defund" and similar in the year of our Gritty, 2022, were "Democratic strategists" (nonsense chyron title) who went on teevee every day talking about how Democrats needed to distance themselves from the evil Left who had taken over the party with their absurd unpopular demands.
That public conversation has largely disappeared. What happened? Many Republican officials were uncomfortable with the Floyd protests, which were a mass of young, left-leaning people demanding major changes to American society and attacking the police, who are disproportionately White, male and conservative. So Republicans started casting the protests as simply rioting. And in red states, they passed laws limiting the ability of Democratic-controlled cities to change their policing practices.
Most of those master strategists are more interested in fighting The Left than Republicans, which is why they kept placing what they claimed to be a fatal slogan front and center every day.
I guess also a few coptroop candidates who ran ads like, "I WILL NEVER DEFUND THE POLICE, UNLIKE THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WHO WANTS TO DEFUND POLICE, SO PLEASE VOTE FOR ME, A DEMOCRAT, NOT LIKE DEFUND DEMOCRATS."